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II

The part played by the Virginia springs in the political and social life of “the States lately in rebellion,” is to a traveller most interesting. The attraction of these springs to Southerners has been in times past, and is still, largely due to the fact that the South has, properly speaking, no other watering-places. Seaside resorts there are none worth mention, from Norfolk down to Mexico, and there are but few points of the long, level, dull, and sandy coast-line which are not more or less unhealthy. Suspicion on this point even hangs around the places in Florida now frequented by Northerners for the sake of the mild winter temperature. But oven if the sea-coast were healthy, it is in summer too hot to be attractive, and offers no relief to persons whose livers and kidneys have got out of order in the lowlands. These naturally seek the hills for coolness, and they go to the sulphur springs of Virginia because the sulphur waters are very powerful and efficacious in their effects on people afflicted with what the doctors call “hepatic troubles.” But then they never would or could have gone from the Southern seaboard to places so far off if it had not been for the inestimable negro. The extent to which he contributed to the rapid pushing out of the scanty white population of the slave States to the Mississippi has never, I think, received due attention. He robbed pioneering, indeed, at the South of most of the hardship with which it is associated in the Northern mind–I was going to say discomfort as well as hardship, but this would be going too far. To the Southern planter, however, who could go West with a party of stalwart negroes to do the clearing, building, ploughing, and cooking and washing, the wilderness had but few of the terrors it presented to the Northern frontiersman. He was speedily provided with a very tolerable home; not certainly the kind of home which the taste of a man as well off at the North would be satisfied with, but a vastly better one than any new settler in the Northwestern States ever had. The springs in the Virginia mountains became popular a century ago, and were greatly resorted to in much the same way. They were remote and in the woods, but, owing to slavery, they swarmed from the very first with servants who could not “give notice” if they did not like the place, or felt lonesome.

The first accommodation at the springs consisted of a circle of log-cabins with a dining-hall and ball-room in the centre, and this constitutes the fundamental plan of a spring to this day. There is now always a hotel in which a considerable number of the visitors both sleep and eat, but the bulk of them, or a very large proportion of them, still live in the long rows of one-storied wooden huts, with galleries running along in front of the doors, which are dignified with the name of “cottages,” but are in reality simply the log-cabin in the next stage of evolution; and the hotel has taken the place of the original dining and ball-rooms to which all resorted. In looking at the cottages, and thinking of the log-cabins which preceded them, and seeing what rude places they are, one wonders a little how people could ever have been, or can now be, induced to leave comfortable homes for the purpose of spending long summers in them. But this brings up one of the marked characteristics of Southern life, namely, the extent to which nearly all Southern men and women were led in the slavery days to associate comfort not with the trimness and order of Northern or English homes, but with an abundance of service. Well-to-do Northerners used to be surprised, in fact, at the amount of what they would consider discomfort in the way of rude or unfinished surroundings, hard beds, poor fare, want of order of all sorts, which even Southerners in easy circumstances were willing to put up with; but the explanation lay in the fact that Southerners placed their luxury in having plenty of servants at command. All the ladies had maids and the men “body servants” wherever they went, and this saved them, even on the frontier, from a great deal of drudgery and inconvenience. Even a log-cabin is not a bad place to lodge in if you have a valet (who cannot leave you) to dress you, and brush your boots and your clothes, and light your fire, and bring you ice-water and juleps and cocktails, and anything else you happen to think of, who sleeps comfortably in a blanket across your door. In fact, without this the Virginia springs could never have become a popular resort until railroads were opened. People used to take twenty days in reaching them from the coast– some in their own carriages with four horses, and a wagon for the baggage and “darkies,” and some in stages, sleeping in taverns on the roadside; but nothing could have made this practicable or tolerable but the band of negroes by whom they were always accompanied. This, too, enabled them to make their plans with certainty for staying at the springs all summer, which they could not have done had they been unable to count on their servants. One gentleman, a Charlestonian, telling me his reminiscences of these long journeys to the springs taken with his parents in their own carriage, when he was a boy, said his mother was very delicate and her health required it. This at the North would have been a joke, as it would have killed a delicate woman to go into the woods with hired “help” or without any service at all.